Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Thursday April 09, 2009 @10:42AM
from the see-spot-run dept.

slreboy writes "The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower. The year 2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73 percent). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008. Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87 percent)..."

The Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics states that bodies in a system must remain in equilibrium. So if we're experiencing global warming where are we getting that energy from? It must be coming from somewhere?

The answer, fellow scientists, is that we are stealing that energy from the Sun.

Yes, my charts and ramblings reveal that our greenhouse gases are trapping sunlight... sunlight that would return to the Sun and heat it back up causing sunspots. I am currently drafting a bill that will move sunspots to the endangered phenomena list. That same bill will introduce that list and hopefully this will be reason enough to form it unlike Senator Kerry's attempt to create the list when he saw Rosie O'Donnell exercising (or so he thought).

Gentlemen, we must act now. There is no more time for debating and arguing. The sunspots are going away and without that, we may lose our natural magnetic storms and maybe even the precious Aurora Borealis. Our Northern Lights are in danger while you sit back here comfortably in your chairs. Today we are polluters in the hands of an angry environment tomorrow we may be dead. We have angered the environment and now we must face the wrath of the environment. Including, but not limited to, the loss of sunspots.

I don't know about you but when I was a kid, we celebrated sunspots with our parents. Upwards we gazed directly into the sun, fueling the optometry industry. Yes, sunspots create jobs and foster growth. Do you want to share sunspot gazing with your children and their children? I know I do.

But all is not lost. The environment is injured and may be weak enough for us to stop it before it kills us all. I propose a preemptive strike now while we still have time. We could sneak in special units disguised in ponchos and Birkenstock's with thermonuclear weapons that would devastate the environment and save us from certain death at its hands. China has already rendered the environment obsolete and it is our turn to follow suit. Gentlemen, the question today is not if we should deal a final blow to the environment but when.

"You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game,
'cause entropy will take it all 'though it seems a shame.
The second law, as we now know, is quite clear to state,
that entropy must increase and not dissipate.

Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!"

Actually, the (less strawman) classic argument from the second law of thermo is to apply the second law to the universe. Is the universe a closed system? If so, then second law implies eventual heat death. Therefore, we should select at least 1 choice of these options:1. Universe is not a closed system (religious types would argue this to be true, with God as the external thing affecting it)2. Universe is of finite age (creationist types tend to go this way, which physics eventually caught up with as big ba

Do we have the ability to measure and the records to compare Venus' annual temperature? Wouldn't it provide a stable base line to compare our own planet's temperature against? It's just a thought and I'm sure someone has tried it, but I've never heard it mentioned. Venus seems like it would be a great indicator of planetary warming due to solar variance.

The article about Jupiter mentions nothing about a planet-wide increase in temperature. The Mars article mentions an increase in dust storm reducing albedo and therefore increasing light absorption. Still a far cry from the ggp's claim that 5 planets are all experiencing the same increase in temperature.

ROFL, and how, pray tell, do those articles qualify as "30 years" of temperature data that "correlate with the rising temperature trends on Earth in that period." Oh, wait, they don't.

Hell, the Jupiter article isn't about planetary warming at all. And as for Mars, "Martian climate is primarily driven by dust and albedo and there is little empirical evidence that Mars is showing long term warming." (source [skepticalscience.com]).

See how I provided a citation for my quote? And how the article linked contains references for its claims? Neat, eh?

Listen, I'm not going to argue the science but what drives me bonkers about both sides of the Global Warming debate is that it completely misses the point that affects us and our surroundings the most: pollution.

Heavy metals in the water, shitty particles in the air, poison in our food. I don't understand why we bicker about the temperature when it's undeniable how much trash we have injected in to our surroundings.

Is clean air, water, and food too much to ask? I'm not even talking about deforestation, over-fishing, and the deleterious affects of industrial agriculture.

We have a footprint, and a great big ugly one at that. We don't live responsibly. Global Warming is a big red herring and I sometimes wonder who benefits from us focusing on it.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film) [wikipedia.org]:"The Sun has instead been "infected" with a Q-ball - a supersymmetric nucleus, left over from the Big Bang - that is disrupting the normal matter. The situation compells humanity to send a spacecraft to the Sun in 2050, the Icarus I, which carries a massive payload, an experimental nuclear bomb, intended to reignite the Sun."

The part that makes the story completely unbelievable??? Humanity working together to fix something.

It's stuff like this that makes me ask when will those neo-republicons take global warming seriously??? There's carbon filling up everywhere, so much the sun is losing her spots, and we just sit here and do nothing about it!!!! We need more diamonds!!!! That will get rid of the carbon!! Obama will fix it. He'll give a cadillacic converter to every car, we'll be converting carbon to diamonds every day as we drive. Diamonds are the solution!!!

1) The Sun does effect global temperature2) It's effects are pretty immediate3) The Global Warming Trend does not follow the Sun activities close enough for it to be the cause of the trend.4) The only thing we know of at this time that could be causing this global warming trend is CO2

5)We are talking about the release of trillions of tons of CO2 that has been buried for millions of years.

6) If we keep increasing will will make the planet uninhabitable by us.

Nah, facts have a true old school reactionary conservative bias. We just don't have many of those now a days.The truth is everyone understands that they want to take our our stuff to give to others. Conservatives just want enough power to defend themselves from that they, and to be truly sustainable so that they can ignore everyone else.

In general, our common sense fails us badly whenever we're looking at rare events -- and in spite of what the evening news may make you believe, shootings are rare events. The solution is to look to science and statistics rather than common sense.

The correct approach to gun regulation is to examine the numbers and look at what kinds of gun control actually have beneficial effects on crime rates. Also, we need to analyze the incidence of crimes prevented by gun ownershi

Yes. Now either disprove it, as GP did with the "sun causes global warming" theory, or provide another that also fits the evidence. You don't get to ignore a scientific theory just because you don't like the conclusion.

I thought the earth has actually been getting cooler since 2004. I also thought the earth constantly went through cycles of heating and cooling. What we do does affect the planet, by all means. How MUCH it is affecting is still very much up for debate.

Me, I like better fuel economy standards and tighter restrictions on discharges into lakes and streams, mainly because I breathe air and drink water. Unfortunately, the environment is now a tool for getting funding and to get that funding, you must agree w

I'm sure that back in the 1600s, you had to agree that the earth was flat to get funding as well.

The best science that money can buy isn't always the best science.

Actually, no. If at any point in recorded history, you proposed that the earth was flat, the overwhelming majority of people thought you were a nutjob.
The idea that Columbus' opponents thought the earth was flat was made up by supporters' of Darwin in the 1800's to belittle their opposition (not all of which was religious).
Columbus' opposition said that if the diameter of the earth was what they calculated it to be (which it turns out was a reasonable approximation of the actual diameter of the earth), Columbus and his crewmen would run out of fresh water before they reached East Asia. Columbus, using his own calculations, said the earth isn't that big. It turns out that Columbus got lucky, because neither side was aware that there was another land mass between Europe and Asia (there is reason to believe that there were Europeans who did know, but that is speculation).

Actually, I realized you probably were questioning the first part of parents' assertions more than the last:

If at any point in recorded history, you proposed that the earth was flat, the overwhelming majority of people thought you were a nutjob.

Yeah, that's a bit more questionable, isn't it? There has been casually observable evidence for the Earth's roundness in certain places (shorelines, where one has an opportunity to see a ship vanish over the horizion hull first, rather than just get too small to s

I thought the earth has actually been getting cooler since 2004. I also thought the earth constantly went through cycles of heating and cooling. What we do does affect the planet, by all means. How MUCH it is affecting is still very much up for debate.

2) Oceans operate on different time scales, no? So is "pretty immediate" geological time or something or a day or so?

3) Could be problems with this point based on 2. And by "trend" what are we talking about. There doesn't seem to be much of an upward trend lately. So if you are thinking the last couple of years have been on an upward trend, that's wrong. If you expand that timeline, we may still be on an upward trend.

4) "The only thing we know"

Given the lack of ability to put past weather information in a predictive model and get accurate results, I would say we don't know much at all.

My climate scientist friend I once spoke to almost 10 years ago now was more skeptical. Even if C02 does what you say, are there feedback loops that mitigate the warming? Cloud cover, stuff like that. We don't know.

6) You don't know 6 is true at all.

7) While I remain skeptical of global warming, I want to get off foreign oil in general. So may I propose a workable solution that many environmentalists don't like: nuclear power. Cut the red tape and streamline the process.

7) While I remain skeptical of global warming, I want to get off foreign oil in general. So may I propose a workable solution that many environmentalists don't like: nuclear power. Cut the red tape and streamline the process.

Which is ironic, because it's one of the most environmentally friendly means to generate power we have. The waste is well contained, and if we built newer reactors we wouldn't have to worry about waste at all.

Even if C02 does what you say, are there feedback loops that mitigate the warming? Cloud cover, stuff like that. We don't know.

Exactly... we don't know. We're modifying our atmosphere and we don't know what it will do. All the reputable science indicates it's either a little bad or VERY VERY bad.

Of course those who are making money from this will tell you it's all hokum... but the problem is that by the time we actually understand what all this CO2 (and others) is doing we will be about 50 years too late to do anything about it.

There are only weather forecasters. Climate science is not science, that would require testability and we don't have anything to test with. When weather forecasters start chucking millions of tonnes of sulphate aerosols (or whatever) into the atmosphere, then it will be science.

Um, studies, the creators of correlation, are a hugely important part of science. They can't show causation like experiments, but they can still be used to make predictions, just like theories resulting from experiments. Climate science is just as much a science as psychology, sociology, biology, and astronomy. (I'd like to see you do an experiment to figure out planetary motion)

I think you were correct right up to 7. Most of the alternatives aren't as good as what we have right now. There is no realistic alternative to the car and all the alternatives to electricity generation are very expensive or unreliable. Space heating is also a serious problem.

Converting to a very low or zero carbon world would involve rebuilding just about every home, office block and factory as well as throwing away and remaking every car. That isn't going to happen any time soon. The expense would make th

Don't overstate the case. It would make the planet less live-able in certain areas (principally by being underwater) and make other areas much more live-able for humans. The problem is the dislocation (which would likely happen over multiple generations) not any threat to the species.

6) If we keep increasing will will make the planet uninhabitable by us.

So, problem solved. Nobody left to burn fossil fuels. The planet's ecosystem recovers and the cockroaches, the proper inheritors of the planet continue on. Just like they did prior to the human infestation.

6) If we keep increasing will will make the planet uninhabitable by us.

Even if we don't, the planet will become uninhabitable. And it will take about the same length of time on the order of hundreds of millions to a billion years. I wonder where hysterical crap like this comes from? It's like the "Iraq caused 911" nonsense that ran through the US a few years ago. Nobody said it or even seriously implied it. Yet somehow there was a bunch of people believing it.

It's strange, but I was recently looking at some ice core CO2 data and noticed that CO2 levels have been so much higher in the past during periods when global temperature was lower than it is now.

"The Carboniferous Period and the Ordovician Period were the only geological periods during the Paleozoic Era when global temperatures were as low as they are today. To the consternation of global warming proponents, the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age while at the same time CO2 concentrations then w

1) The Sun does effect global temperature2) It's effects are pretty immediate3) The Global Warming Trend does not follow the Sun activities close enough for it to be the cause of the trend.4) The only thing we know of at this time that could be causing this global warming trend is CO2

5)We are talking about the release of trillions of tons of CO2 that has been buried for millions of years.

6) If we keep increasing will will make the planet uninhabitable by us.

7) We have workable solutions to this right now.

3. is incorrect. While we may get the light in terms of minutes from its departure from our heavenly body, the energy released when it gets here is distributed and absorbed. Then it is up to a whole other set of processes to get it back out. It may go into heating the atmosphere. it may heat the oceans, it may provide energy to a plant for photosynthesis. So that energy may be radiated back out immediately, or may be deferred until night time, where it is released again. Or it can be part of a plant for mi

is it taking editors the 2nd time around [slashdot.org] to post these stories. /rant

While it may not be time to panic, there are some other startling signs

Measurements by the Ulysses spacecraft reveal a 20 percent drop in solar wind pressure since the mid-1990sâ"the lowest point since such measurements began in the 1960s.

Careful measurements by several NASA spacecraft have also shown that the sun's brightness has dimmed by 0.02 percent at visible wavelengths and a whopping 6 percent at extreme UV wavelengths since the solar minimum of 1996.

Finally, radio telescopes are recording the dimmest "radio sun" since 1955.

At this point there's nothing really we can do, but it may need an explanation as to why it has hit such a low, and when the below-average maximum will occur (supposedly in 2012).

Links?The only study I am aware related to this has to do with light hitting the planet. In that study the light hitting the earth wasn't unchanged, just the light hitting the ground. This lead to the conclusion that both particulate matter and contrails were causing more light to be reflected. Actually slowing the effects of global warming, but not stopping it.

I picked a good year to get licensed for ham radio. I sure get sick of hearing about how you can work Australia on a wet noodle during high Sunspot years. At least the low bands are reliable, but then again those bands require ginormous antennas. So as a consequence my house looks like some sort of martian communications test zone [qrz.com]. I think my neighbors fear me enough not to seriously ask what's going on.

The pendulum swings both ways, and I think that Sol may swing back with a fury from this sub solar minimum to an above level solar maximum. We may wind up with the predicted power problems and possibly airline flights having to fly lower than usual to reduce dosages to their pax.

Then again, we don't really know our star very well and it is an older one, in the scope of things.

Not only is the summary ripped from the linked article without quoting it, but the article is plagiarized in whole from ScienceDaily [sciencedaily.com]! I knew I'd seen it before this article, and this explains why. The blogger even hotlinked the image from science daily, wasting their bandwidth.

The linked article in the summary should be adjusted to the original ScienceDaily article and the entire summary should be quoted from it rather than attributed to slreboy.

What this quiet time is doing is failing to pressure us into hardening the electrical grid against electromagnetic storm events. So in 5 or 10 years when we pull up out of this point we will all have electrical cars pulling power from desert and off shore wind farms over long lines. Then the electromagnetic storm will take out the continental electrical grid.

The conditions on the shortwave bands seriously suck right now! I miss those "wet noodle" days that AI1P, Mr_Perl mentioned where you could work Australia with 4 watts into a mobile antenna on 20 meters and get a 589 report.

I realize that HAM radio is a bit of an anachronism in the eyes of most slashdot readers, but it's still the most viable medium for emergency communications. Unfortunately, with sunspot activity being so low, HF communications become very limited. Whole bands of RF spectrum are almost unusable, because the E-layer of the ionosphere can no longer bounce higher frequencies of radio waves. 40m wavelength and lower tend to still be usable, 20m is come-and-go, and 17m and higher become sporadic or completely unusable.

I'm 31, I've been a HAM for 6 years. My cell phone often doesn't get coverage where I roam, and my power and internet and landline phone have been knocked out by storms and provider mistakes. Radio works when all else fails......but sometimes it works better than others!

The material world doesn't understand seconds either. Should we drop the whole of physics? A year is just a sampling period which can be compared to previous periods. Any natural cycles will be apparent regardless of the period chosen (nyquist notwithstanding).

I think his point was that you should not compare a year's worth of data to 3 months' worth. They could simply take the last 365 days and compare it to the 365 before that and it would make a lot more sense.

The problem, of course, is all the -other- people already using calendar years with their data like it means something.

We use the Calendar, and we use it together measurements, look for trends, make predictions, etc...By your 'logic' Atomic vibrations don't follow our time keeping methods therefore any clock using them would be irrelevant.

The boom-bust cycle that has plagued the economy for so long is clearly due to the Sun's influence. Our only hope of a stable economy is to destroy the Sun once and for all.

For too long we've been at the mercy of the whims of the Sun. Sure, we built that fancy iron core and produced a magnetic field to protect us from the harshest of the Sun's radiation, but the Sun still has almost total control over our precious climate. This situation is simply untenable. Millenia of effort and animal sacrifice have shown that the Sun simply cannot be negotiated with...our only chance is a massive nuclear strike.

You know, I've been wondering - doesn't Sun worship really make the most sense of pretty much any religion?

Unlike Jehova, I can actually prove that the sun is the source of all life on this planet, that it nourishes and sustains me and other living things, and that the world will end because of its actions.

We like to make fun of prehistoric religions, but sometimes I think they're actually pretty rational.

Good point...after decades of studying sunspot activity, it's only natural for the Sun to get self-conscious about everyone staring at its blemishes all the time. It's only natural it would try and hide them by turning the other way.

Visit http://www.spaceweather.com/ [spaceweather.com] for a real time holographic view of the far side of the sun. They've been able to detect far-side sunspots for several years now. Full details and images are available, as well as a primer about the process; look on the left sidebar beneath the front-side daily photograph.

We can't know how many sunspots there really are if we're only seeing only half the surface of our star, right?

We see more than half of the surface.

A technique called "helioseismic holography" [spaceweather.com] can detect sunspots on the far side of the sun. There is also a pair of spacecraft called STEREO [jhuapl.edu] which are in a solar orbit that lets them see parts of the sun that are not visible from earth.

There are several hundred years worth of data [wikipedia.org], showing a regular 11 year cycle. Even measurements plotted monthly map to that graph.

You seem to be displaying a form of anthropomorphism towards the sun. You can't just map the lifespan of a human to the lifespan of the sun and conclude that from your perceived frame of reference, a year is the equivalent of a fraction of a second or 'blip'.

Comparing a 90 day period to a 365 day period isn't a like for like comparison (obviously). Statistically it's meaningless.

Not so. We have two statistical samplings, one with n=90, one with n=365. Based on the sample sizes and some other info, we can establish a confidence interval. Yes, the interval will be larger for the 90-day sample... but just because we can't be 100% confident of the exact results doesn't mean it's statistically meaningless.

One other note -- historical data must be used to establish that there are not periodic cycles with a frequency of less than one year, which would make the 90-day sample set inaccurate.

It's simply an early trend, which may point towards further decreasing sunspot activity. I hope you're not seriously trying to tell us you believe there's no difference between a 90-day sample period and a 1-day sample period.

Also, from the article, please note that scientists are not completely brain-dead:

Pesnell believes sunspot counts should pick up again soon, "possibly by the end of the year," to be followed by a solar maximum of below-average intensity in 2012 or 2013. But like other forecasters, he knows he could be wrong. Bull or bear? Stay tuned for updates.

In other words, they're not simply extrapolating the entire year based on a 90-day cycle. Rather, they're looking at how this period fits into a larger trend.

I think a confusing aspect about this whole thing is the idea of applying our basically arbitrary start and end dates for the year to what the sun is doing. Even if the sun operates on a cycle that basically does just happen to match up with a whole number of our earth years, the fact that we decided to start calling the present 2009 instead of 2008 doesn't mean much to the sun.

The sort of time cycles that we experience on a regular basis (day, week, month, year) aren't particularly relevant to the sun, and

You should hope you're wrong. The good thing about the global warming scare, true or false, is it gives the masses of dumb people some kind of tangible cost in the near future for their use of an unsustainable and unhealthy energy policy.

The backlash against "global warming" hype will have the opposite effect, it will make people say 'fuck it, I'm gonna drive an SUV and leave my AC at 68 degrees all day'.

Global warming is not the only (potential, if you buy into it) problem with our energy policy. Another